The 7th Continent Review | Board Games | Zatu Games UK

The 7th Continent is a narrative-focused adventure game of exploration, discovery, and survival. Drawing inspiration from the choose-your-own-adventure books of the 80s and 90s. This highly thematic game puts players in charge of explorers who recently returned from the first expedition to the mysterious seventh continent. Except, when they get back, they discover they have brought with them a terrible curse.

To lift the curse, the players must return to the continent and retrace their steps to undo their mistakes. But the seventh continent is a dangerous place, where death can come from starvation, injury, perilous terrain, ferocious fauna, and trap-filled temples. Players will need to craft items, hunt for food, and plan for the long term because exploring The 7th Continent is no small undertaking.

Getting Started

When playing a game of The 7th Continent, the first thing you do is choose a curse. This will set your primary goal. The base game comes with three curses of increasing difficulty. Each curse comes with a clue. This could be a map, a symbol, a riddle, something to get you started. It will also give you a starting location. A curse will drop you in a different part of the continent.

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Players then choose a character, one of five different explorers with their own unique. Each with their own unique skills, which will be shuffled into the Skills Deck. Depending on the number of players, you will also get dice to use for tracking the uses of any items you craft.

After that, you’re ready to go. This game takes minutes to set up, which is good because it’s going to take hours to play. Each curse will likely take multiple sessions to complete, so make sure your group is committed. That said, it is possible for players to drop out or even join a game already in progress.

Progress And Penalties

Exploring the continent and removing the curse is done with a single game mechanic, repeated constantly throughout the game.

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Each round, players select an action on their current location indicated by a white box with an icon that signals the action’s type. To successfully complete the action, draw a number of cards from the Action Deck and add up the number of star symbols on the right-hand side of the card. The number of stars required for an action depends on its difficulty. Some will require more than others, and some actions limit how many cards must be drawn. The players can draw as many cards as they think they will need in order to succeed.

Success means resolving the action’s rewards. This might mean discarding a hazard, crafting an item, revealing more of the map, or moving to a new location. If the test fails, the players must resolve penalties such as gaining negative conditions, damaging and discarding items or banishing a card from the game.

So why not draw fifty cards for each test to guarantee success? The action deck is also your life force. Buried in the deck are several purple curse cards. When you first run through the deck, these cards have no effect (other than granting no stars for skill tests), but if ever the Action Deck becomes empty. You must reshuffle it into a new, more deadly Action Deck. If you draw a single curse card during action with this discard Action Deck, you all die, and the adventure is over!

Staying Alive

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It might feel like the action deck presents a hard time limit on the game, there are many ways to prolong your expedition to the continent. There are many ways to prolong your expedition to the continent. When the test ends, succeed or fail, one character involved in the action may add one of the revealed cards to their hand. As well as stars for action resolution, Action cards represent craftable items, skills, and special actions, all of which will help the explorers survive longer.

Skill cards can be played to turn failures into successes. Items can be crafted to make your actions more efficient. When you find food, it can be eaten to shuffle cards from the discard pile back into the Action Deck. There’s also an experienced mechanic that lets you spend experience points on advanced skills that get added to your Action Deck, making it bigger and stronger.

Of course, food can run out. Items break after too many uses, and the limited hand sizes stop you from hoarding too many resources. There’s a curse to remove, after all.